Committee Launch and Initial Meeting

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

We need to hold an initial meeting to take care of some housekeeping,
orient ourselves, and consider the initial feedback from the review of
the contributor agreements.

I've watched about 45 emails go back and forth on the WebCom mailing list
about when to hold their first meeting, so to cut to the chase I would
like to declare the meeting will be Monday March 13th at 12:00noon EST.
This should roughly be in the regular business day for western europe to
the west coast.  I'm not quite sure how many hours Jody is out, but I
imagine it sucks for him a bit.  I think it likely sucks badly for Cameron.

Those who can't attend should try and send their thoughts on the agenda items
to the mailing list and we will try to take them into account.  My intention
is to hold the meeting entirely on IRC, as my recent experience with
conference calls haven't been to thrilling.  And besides that gives fast
but sloppy typers like me an advantage (just kidding!).

At the meeting we can consider how we want to hold future meetings.

I have setup an agenda page in the wiki:

   http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/IncCom1_Agenda

As I see it our key action item is to have collected feedback from the
developers of our respective projects on the draft contributor agreements.

   http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Contributor_Agreement

Markus already has some substantial feedback from the GRASS community.  Markus
could you distribute a copy of your feedback to the Incubator mailing list?

Some projects have also started on the process of IP review.  I know Jody
has been looking into trademark issues for GeoTools, and Steve has done a
detailed assessment of who has contributed to MapServer.  I am hoping we
can come out of the meeting with a good idea what actions the rest of us
need to be doing in this vein.

Please feel free to add items to the Agenda and summarize findings and
questions here on this list.

Keep in mind that Rich Steele, the foundation counsel (aka lawyer) is
on this list, and is available to provide legal feedback on the various
questions that are coming up.  He has already annotated the contributor
agreement with an FAQ which we can extend as more questions come up.

For those who are unclear on our mandate, this committee was formed with
the motion:

   https://incubator.osgeo.org/IncubatorMotion.html

This lists our initial members.  We have also solicited an official
representative of each prospective project.  Currently GRASS hasn't decided
on a rep, so I have forcable added Markus to the mailing list in the meantime.

I am chairing the committee and as such am responsible for reporting back to
the board on our activities.

Anyone is welcome to subscribe to the incubator list and participate in
irc meetings as long a we can maintain some degree of order.  However, only
official committee members may propose or vote on motions.   All members of
the committee should also find they have SVN commit access on the Incubation
Committee web site (http://incubator.osgeo.org) though I have put a fair
amount of our "work in progress" documents in the wiki for now.

I think we face a lot of work and excitement as we try to process our
eight projects through incubation at the same time as we try to figure out
what that means.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org